


Lemons & Possibility

by niseag



Category: Parks and Recreation
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:54:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25235776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/niseag/pseuds/niseag
Summary: "He looks at Leslie for a long moment, wondering if he has ever cared so much about something that he’d knowingly put his job on the line for it. If it’s possible he ever could. How does someone care so much?"Or: all the moments in his life when Ben Wyatt falls in love with Leslie Knope.
Relationships: Leslie Knope/Ben Wyatt
Comments: 17
Kudos: 94





	Lemons & Possibility

**Author's Note:**

  * For [alluringpoehler](https://archiveofourown.org/users/alluringpoehler/gifts).



Ben’s not worried about his meeting with the Parks department heads.

They’re nothing special. A stocky, gruff-looking man and a smiling, nervous woman. He’s seen these same people a hundred times in a long, long line of podunk towns strewn across the vast, empty expanse of backwater Indiana.

In fact, if you asked, Ben could tell you right now exactly how this meeting’s about to go: the man with the mustache will ark up and pick a fight with him—not over anything in particular, just for the sake of throwing his weight around—and the woman will anxiously try to smooth things over. None of it will matter because Ben will cut their budget anyway. They’ll lose someone in administration (the guy with the coffee stain on his sweater vest, probably) and wind up on maintenance only. If they’re lucky. He’s not sure how bad this is yet.

This is all a formality, Ben thinks as he flips through the papers in his padfolio, and he wonders vaguely, for the hundredth time, if this is really what he’d imagined his path to redemption might look like. Wandering from town to town, having the same meetings with the same people behind different faces, wearing different clothes, in different old stone buildings with different horrible murals.

The meeting starts off as usual, with pandering and sandpaper dryness—until Ben says they need to look at waste and the department heads snort and contradict each other and everything goes wildly off script.

Leslie Knope glares at him with god’s own fury. “You’re a jerk,” she says, insensible to the sheer stupidity of insulting the man who holds her career in his hands. She launches into a righteous tirade, thrusting herself between Ben and the colleagues she so clearly loves without so much as a second thought.

And just like that, the fortress he’s built for himself over all these years crumbles around him like the walls of Jericho.

For the first time since he packed his shitbox car and left Partridge in the dust, Ben feels the terrifying pull of entropy deep in his chest and he knows—as surely as he knows the quadratic formula and leaves fall in autumn and Han shot first—he _knows_ that Pawnee, Indiana is not just another town.

That this blonde isn’t just another blonde.

And he’s got to get out of here before he does something very stupid.

***

He does something stupid anyway.

Maybe not that day, maybe not the next.

But one afternoon Ben Wyatt finds himself on the road to Eagleton to pick up a children’s musician for Leslie Knope when he’d been making the business case for firing her only that morning. 

She asks him why he did it and the only thing he can think of to say is that he wanted the kids to have their concert. He doesn’t think it’s entirely true but he’s not sure what the objective truth is either. It’s grey and opaque and elusive, but he knows he wanted _something_ and the way Leslie is smiling at him and talking about _people_ and _service_ makes him feel like he got it, whatever it might have been.

When she walks away all he can do is look after her, blinking in the warmth of the sunlight.

***

The sight of her essential personnel badge makes him smile the next morning when she walks into the task force meeting.

If you asked him, he couldn’t tell you why.

***

June turns to July turns to August in a blur of steel on steel as Ben and Leslie lunge and feint and parry and strike over and over ( _and over and over and over_ ) until both of them are a hair’s breadth from losing it.

She just won’t quit. It’s driving him crazy.

He keeps sending her away until she comes up with reasonable solutions. The challenge only seems to spur her on.

And if there are some days when Leslie pushes too hard, asks too much, stays at the office too late to puzzle something out or take him down a few pegs—if Ben could leave city hall at five o’clock but always waits for her and goes another five rounds instead—well, that’s just in the spirit of good, robust public service.

He’s not going to think about how he used to think public service was only grey skies and long empty highways and complacency. Or about how public service seems a lot like something else these days—like lemons and possibility and the future.

***

He’s at a gay bar and he’s pretty sure she’s legitimately insane.

He tries to explain why he can’t give her all the money she’s asking for. Because _‘I do actually like you as a person’_ and _‘I want to’_ aren’t reasons, because there’s procedure and modelling and key indicators and all of that, because he’s followed his whims before and ended up impeached on the steps of his very own City Hall.

He really tries to tell her, lays his humiliation bare so she might see where he’s coming from here and hopes she understands.

She contemplates him for a moment, still playing with that cherry stem.

“Well, I don’t know,” Leslie says, “I think Ice Town sounds great.” She looks him in the eye and he can tell she is being totally, artlessly earnest. “And the point is, at least you _tried_ something.”

He blinks at her as something inside him stirs. 

And it strikes Ben that Ron Swanson was right back in the spring when he said no other department had a Leslie Knope. She’s something all on her own. He’s known that, really, since she called him a jerk in the Parks Department board room, but the reality hits him now, in this bar, as she looks at him and takes in Ice Town and all she’s got to say is that the point is that he was trying. 

He’s been on the road eleven long years and he’s never met anyone else like her in Indiana.

There might not even be anyone else like her in all of America.

Possibly the world.

***

The next day, Ben is holding a pumpkin while the Chariots of Fire theme plays. Chris looks charmed, as if this isn’t the eighth time Leslie has sat them down for a presentation with props and a soundtrack in the few short months they’ve been here.

They’ve all been grand and inspiring, of course, but if Ben were inclined to make decisions based on gut feelings they wouldn’t be here right now. He’d have given in a long time ago.

So he’s more than a little skeptical.

The festival would have to be huge to make the kind of money Leslie is talking about. The turnout would have to be half the size of Pawnee at least. And what happens if people _don’t_ come?

When he asks, Leslie doesn’t pout or push back like she usually does when he throws cold water on her starry-eyed plans. She’s calm, but he can tell there’s a streak of nervous energy in her as she turns to look at her colleagues gathered around her like she’s waiting for something.

When Ron nods, she takes a breath and turns back to look Ben in the eye.

“Well,” she says, “then you eliminate the Parks Department.”

He looks from Leslie to her department—all standing by her unflinching although she’s put all their jobs, their futures on the line. Even Jerry, two years from retirement. Even the standoffish intern. Even Ron Swanson, who Ben has actually witnessed _giggling_ over the prospect of cutting government funds, is standing here risking his job for the chance to raise revenue.

Everyone’s eyes drift to Ben, waiting for his answer.

He looks at Leslie for a long moment, wondering if he has ever cared so much about something that he’d knowingly put his job on the line for it. If it’s possible he ever could.

How does someone _care_ so much?

Leslie’s looking at him like all of her dreams are resting on his answer. Because they are. Because Ben knows that’s who she is—the woman who wants to try something, who’ll accept any risk to herself if it means she gets the chance to do the right thing.

And it is a risk. It’s a huge one. And Ben isn’t here to make wagers with city employees. He’s a razer, not a builder—and certainly not a gambler.

They’re not meant to get involved like this. This is where he’s supposed to pull Chris back. It’s simply not appropriate to make this kind of deal. Because it’s not just the future of the Parks Department on the table, it’s Chris and Ben’s careers too. Chris is blind to it now, but Ben knows that if he says yes and this festival fails and they have to return to the state house and explain why they cut an entire department from the eighth largest city in Indiana, it is going to end very poorly for the both of them. It’s every kind of stupid and unprofessional Ben has spent a decade trying not to be.

It’s a bad idea.

But he looks at Leslie. She’s standing there, vulnerable, with all her cards on the table and nowhere to hide and he sees the irrepressible hope in her eyes.

He sees the possibility.

He sees the colours and the lights and the ferris wheel, the farm animals in their pens and children running around with painted faces and ice cream stains on their clothes. And he sees Leslie Knope standing there in the middle of it all, beaming. 

He sees the chance to find out what it might be like to take a risk and what it might be like to care.

“Yeah,” he says. “Alright.”

***

One minute Leslie can’t tell the floor and wall apart, and the next she’s talking about direct customer-to-business exposure and showcasing the small business community.

Against all the odds in the world, she’s doing this thing again. Magic.

“The time is now,” she says. “The place is Pawnee. Let’s make history.”

That’s Leslie Knope.

***

“Did they rent you a house this time?” Steph asks. 

“Not exactly.”

“But you’re cooking.”

Ben looks at the slow cooker in its box on his motel bed. “Something like that.”

“Okay.”

“Shut up. Would you just give me the soup recipe?”

***

Just like that, Leslie and Ben are playing on the same team.

Leslie is no longer his opponent but his defender. And he’s no longer an enemy but her accomplice. Watching her work and not being afraid of having to go eight rounds with her when she brings it to him fills Ben with a new sense of admiration for her, something even deeper and more sincere than he held in all the months before.

If he once wondered how she got so much done with so much enthusiasm, now he knows it’s because she goes to sleep at one o’clock in the morning and wakes up at half past four and runs on nothing but sugar and caffeine and sheer force of will.

He knows because he’s often her first call in the morning and her last call at night. Because JJ himself knows his breakfast order by heart and Ben knows the city hall security alarm code better than he knows his own mother’s address.

Somehow Ben has become Leslie’s right hand man.

He only realises it when he gets an angry call from Ann Perkins, demanding to know what he has done to Leslie.

Ben’s not sure he’s done anything, exactly, but Ann seems convinced that something is wrong because Leslie isn’t calling Ann at midnight with work-related problems or telling Ann about City Council’s gridlock or asking Ann to do insane, impossible favours on weekends like she used to.

And it’s not that Ann _likes_ or really even cares about any of those things, she explains. It’s that they’re Leslie things—she does them for _Leslie_ —and Ben doesn’t have a great track record in terms of Leslie’s general happiness.

Ann knows she’s been spending a lot of time with him lately working on the festival and if Ben has done anything to dampen her dreams or demand too much of her or any other thing that would keep Leslie from being Leslie, Ann is going to murder him.

Ron Swanson will help, she says.

Ben’s at a total loss for a moment, because Leslie _does_ do all those things.

If anything, she’s become more prolific than ever.

He loves talking to her about City Council and troubleshooting festival logistics. On more than one occasion he’s been lured out of bed on a day off for community canvassing or to pick up garbage in a park, and they’re invariably the best weekends he’s had in years.

She definitely does all of those things Ann hates.

Ben frowns for a moment, entirely confused. And then he pieces it together.

Nothing is wrong at all. Leslie just does all those things with _him_ now. Only him. Because he enjoys them and Ann doesn’t.

And if he’s doing things Ann used to do, that must mean that he and Leslie are really, seriously friends. She might be the first real friend he’s had in years ( _not counting Chris_ ) and that’s something to think about—not now, but later.

Ann doesn’t seem to believe him at first, so Ben finds himself recounting the saga of Councilman Milton’s deranged filibuster and telling her about the pair of shoes Ben had to throw in the trash after he stepped in the deepest pile of dog shit imaginable in Ramsett Park. He’s trying to prove that Leslie really is wholly herself.

“Okay, god, yes, you’re both terrible dorks!” Ann relents at last, shouting over him as he’s talking her through their latest debate about where to place the sheep shearers. “I get it. God. I believe you.”

“Oh,” Ben says, relieved. It seems unwise to have Ann against him. “Well, yeah. Good. That’s… Yeah. I promise, Leslie is as Leslie as ever.”

Ann hums, sounding contemplative.

“What?”

“Nothing,” she says. “Nothing.” There’s a pause, and then Ann says, kind of absently, “I guess I owe you one, Wyatt.”

***

Since the last giddy night of the Harvest Festival after all the floodlights had gone out for the last time, after all the crowds had cleared and the fairgrounds fell quiet and Ben and Leslie had kicked soda cans around the corn maze and toasted warm beers to what they’d built together, he has been haunted by two things.

Firstly, he’s leaving Pawnee in just a couple of weeks.

And secondly, he can no longer imagine his life without Leslie Knope in it.

***

He hasn’t been sleeping well. He’s been dreading having to say that he’s leaving, and now that he’s got the letter he can’t pretend it’s not happening any more.

When Andy catches him while he’s on his way to Chris’s office and implores Ben to bring a 3D capable _television_ to his party tonight it’s nearly enough to break through his last vestige of sanity.

In another town, in a time before Pawnee, Ben might have been sarcastic, might have made a rude comment about the absurdity of the request or the late notice or how Andy interrupted him when he’s clearly in a hurry.

But that Ben is gone, and it’s a good thing.

Instead, he says he’ll see what he can do and gives Andy a sad smile that flies right over his head.

Ben’s actually going to miss Andy when he leaves.

***

A job.

Chris just offered him a job.

_In Pawnee._

***

He’s not sure he can make this decision alone. Leslie has the right to an opinion here. This is her home, her life. He can’t just inflict himself on her if she doesn’t want him to live in Pawnee or work with her at City Hall.

Ben has no idea where he could possibly go now if she doesn’t want him here, but he knows he’d rather walk away into the harsh unknown than tarnish the one thing she loves more than anything.

His heart is pounding the entire time she’s talking, weighing up his experience against the wonders of Pawnee, smiling while she sits firmly on the fence.

She tells him to make a pros and cons list, but he already knows what’s on it.

One big pro.

No cons.

***

He goes back to his office, closes the door and sits down to think seriously about this. 

Leslie Knope has never been neutral on anything in her life. She called him a jerk the day they met. He thinks he’d probably know for sure if she didn’t want him here.

He thought he’d also know for sure if she _did_ want him here, but… but maybe she doesn’t feel like it’s her place to ask him to stay, like he doesn’t feel like it’s his place to decide to stay without her permission. Maybe they’re both skirting around this whole thing because it doesn’t seem like enough time has passed for this to be important.

But it is, isn’t it?

It is important.

And he’s got a choice to make.

He can go back on the road, he can gut towns and slip back into being cold, hard, mean Ben. He’s done it before. He could do it again. But he’s not sure he could ever forget the glimpse he’s gotten of this life, not sure he can live without the road not taken lingering in the back of his mind. He’s not sure tearing things apart will ever feel right after knowing what it’s like to build something.

So he could stay. He could decide to stay and perhaps it will pan out that Leslie doesn’t want him here or he won’t be able to settle down after wandering for so long or the job is terrible. It might all go wrong. He might have thrown away twelve years with the state government for nothing.

But at least he’ll have tried, right?

It seems like it’s probably worth the risk.

***

He goes to the party.

He doesn’t bring a TV.

He looks over at Leslie when Andy says you’ve got to do what makes you happy and he’s pretty sure he made the right choice.

And when Leslie comes up to him later in the night, when she smiles and says, “Stay here, help us build something,” he knows, without a doubt, that he did.

***

Things are complicated.

There’s the rule, and there’s breaking it.

There’s a few blissful weeks spent in a bubble where everything’s perfect and peppermint fresh and he can see the future stretching out before him like a brand new road running straight to the horizon—and there’s Marlene Griggs-Knope’s hand on his knee.

There’s Li’l Sebastian dying and the ladies’ yacht club and a button that brings Ben to gruesome, gut wrenching sobs in the darkness before he works up the courage to give it to her.

There’s being madly in love with Leslie, and there’s never getting to tell her.

There are moments when he’s so proud of her he could burst and others when all he can do is stare at the Harvest Festival photograph on his wall and one moment when he finally stops running and lets it hit him, when he’s so terribly miserable he bursts into tears in a comic book store dressed as Batman.

So the world ends.

They start a war, and they end one.

And the only thing Ben’s still sure of is that he couldn’t take any of it back. Because he’s a better man for knowing Leslie Knope and Pawnee will be a better town for electing her.

If that means he’s got to keep his distance, if loving her means accepting that her ambition comes first, if it means helping her achieve everything she’s dreamt of by pushing her away…

Well, Ben Wyatt has spent a very long time being the bad guy.

And at least this once, there’s a cold comfort in his certainty that it really, truly is for the best.

***

He’s not sure what moving on is supposed to look like, but it must be possible to have some kind of life that hurts less than only having half of her, a ghost, a smiling, incorporeal Leslie who slips through his fingers in every way that’s important.

Ben has lived with ghosts for long enough. And just because this ghost is friendly doesn’t mean she isn’t haunting him.

***

She leaves one voicemail instead of twenty and because she’s making an effort— _for Leslie, holding back is making an effort_ —and also because he kind of owes Ann Perkins, Ben goes to the park.

He doesn’t know what he’s expecting to find in Leslie tonight, but he knows that no matter what happens he is walking out of this with his dignity intact. His resignation is typed and saved on his computer, and if Leslie can’t let go tonight he is going to drive back to the office and send it to Chris, and he’s going to take his patched up heart and run somewhere far away, where she can’t unpick any more of the stitches she’s made in him and he can hold onto this new person he’s become without growing bitter.

Ben walks towards the park like he’s walking the plank and he prays to a god he doesn’t believe in that she’ll just let go of this.

***

She does.

She says everything he’s been hoping for and Ben exhales, expelling all his regret and making room for relief in his lungs.

But none comes.

He stands slowly, shoves his hands into his pockets and starts to walk away.

It’s done. It’s over. So why does he feel like it didn’t go quite the way it was supposed to? He has the strangest sensation that he was waiting for something—but whatever it was, it never came. 

He hears Leslie draw a deep breath behind him and he squeezes his eyes shut.

“There is another option.”

Her voice rings out clear and warm in the biting November air. Ben stills and turns slowly, numb with disbelief, desperate to believe her but halfway to being angry that she’s really about to put them both through this _again._

He has lived his grief, but living hers too is just too much to carry. This is why they have to stop. 

She just told him she understood.

Leslie has dragged him through her denial and through her anger. He can’t deal with her bargaining, too. He just can’t.

“We could just say screw it and do this thing for real.”

“What?” There’s simply no way she can be serious. There is no way to do this. They both know that.

“I miss you like crazy.” She looks like she might be as broken as he is. “I think about you all the time.” Her eyes are bright with tears and he can’t do this. He can’t. “I want to be with you. So let’s just say screw it.” 

“No,” he says. They’ve been through this. “We would have to tell Chris.”

“Yeah,” Leslie nods.

“It could turn into a scandal.” They’ve looked at this a thousand ways. There’s no way out of this. And now he’s _this close_ to outright resentment, because it is so incredibly unfair of her to put this back on him, _again_ , when she’d told him no more than a minute ago that she understood. 

“Yeah.”

“It could hurt your campaign!” 

_“Yes_ , _”_ she says, alive and impatient as he asks how she imagines it could be possible and finally— _finally_ —he sees the way she’s smiling. And it occurs to him that he might be missing something here.

He looks at Leslie, really looks at her, for the first time in weeks and he sees how pale she is, how big her eyes are and the desperation behind them.

He sees the hope and the conviction and that long, straight road to the horizon and holy fuck, he thinks she really means it.

He knows this look.

This is Leslie Knope taking a risk.

“This is how I feel,” she says, looking for all the world like she might die if he doesn’t say something. “How do you feel?” 

And Ben doesn’t answer her.

At least not with words.

***

Ben wondered once, a long time ago, whether he’d ever care about anything enough to risk his job for it.

He doesn’t wonder any more.

***

The recount is drawing to a close and he and Leslie are waiting. She seems calmer, more present than he’d expected after the way the night has gone.

The loss, the job offer, asking him to stay. Vanishing to the City Council chambers and coming back for the final tally.

He’s glad she asked him to stay, that she feels she has enough of a claim on him and his life to have a say in it and to keep him beside her. He wants her to feel that way. There’s something steady and reassuring in it that Ben’s never had before, and he thinks he could get used to it. That’s worth giving up Washington for. More than worth it.

He checks his watch, thoughts drifting back to the recount. Leslie’s still quiet.

Meditative is a strange look on her. As he’s wondering what’s on her mind, she reaches for her purse and pulls out a box. Not just _a box_ , he realises. His box.

She opens it, reveals the figure inside, and Ben’s at a loss.

“You have to go to Washington,” she says solemnly, eyes bright with tears and with sincerity.

He doesn’t. He really doesn’t. It would probably have been an incredible experience, but he doesn’t need it. All he needs is right here. “I told you, I’m turning it down.”

Leslie shakes her head. “I was being selfish,” she says, like it’s been weighing on her. Is this what’s been on her mind? “You put your whole life on hold for me. The very least I can do is try to return the favour.”

He can’t quite believe she’s really doing this, really saying after all these months of waiting to be together like a normal couple that he should leave and follow a distant dream instead.

But he looks at the box and remembers how it felt in his hand when he opened it, sitting across the table from her like she’s sitting across from him now. He remembers how it felt to be where Leslie is and how it felt to want her and to give her up in the same breath, how hard and how heavy it is to love and to let go.

“Thank you,” he murmurs. It means more than he can ever say.

Six months, he thinks. Then he’s never leaving again.

***

Ben sits in his office for a long time after Jennifer leaves with his half-finished beer.

He thinks about the lemon trees in Leslie’s yard, thinks about waffles and vanilla ice cream and loyalty, about possibility and pumpkins the size of Jeeps.

About caring and about taking risks. 

Ben thinks about that long, straight road and clear days and seeing all the way to the edge of the world where the sun breaks over the horizon and bursts into the heavens, and maybe it’s only pollution but he never wants to look at another sky again as long as he lives.

He thinks about the future.

***

She says yes.

They go to Hawaii and London and Paris.

She brings Pawnee and Eagleton together, brings the National Parks Service to the third floor of City Hall.

She brings their children into the world, all at once, because she’s Leslie Knope and she never does anything by halves.

He has the chance to be mayor again, to do it all right this time. He says no and runs for congress instead.

When they’ve done everything there is to do in Pawnee, Indiana, they take a leap into the great unknown in Washington DC with no idea what might be waiting for them.

But whatever it is, they’re ready. 

***

Ben isn’t sure how they ended up in this predicament, but really, not being able to decide whether you are going to run for governor or whether your wife is going to run for governor is a pretty great problem to have.

At least in theory.

He thinks Leslie might want it more but that’s not a conversation they’ve had yet—and if he’s honest with himself, he’s apprehensive about it.

Because as much as Leslie has come into her own, as much as she’s matured and learned to hone her fire and her hunger, she really can still be formidable. And there’s a real potential that this could come to a head if they can’t think of a solution.

The problem is that other than hunger for it, there’s really nothing else to go on here.

They’ve been over it a dozen times and keep coming up blank as to how to decide. There’s no edge, nothing that makes one of them a better candidate than the other. The campaign might be easier for Ben, but the networking and the personality politics both come more easily to Leslie. He’s a natural on hard data and technicalities, but Leslie’s gut is infallible.

They complement each other perfectly and they are so evenly matched as to make this absolutely, gut-wrenchingly impossible.

Ben hopes someone has a simple answer.

“I have an idea,” Leslie says. “I think we should flip a coin.” He blinks. “I mean it. Let’s literally flip a coin. Because whoever runs is gonna do a great job, and whoever doesn't run is gonna be right alongside the other one, offering advice and support and whatever they need. So it doesn't matter.” She grins expectantly. “So let's flip a coin.”

Is he hearing this right? “Okay. You, Leslie Knope, the queen of planning and binders and pro-and-con lists— _you_ want to leave this to chance?”

She smiles. “Yes. Because whatever's next, you and I are in it together.”

Ben’s heart swells as she talks about signing the coin and history and the Smithsonian, but he’s not really listening.

After all these years, it’s still her.

That’s still Leslie Knope.

***

“Leslie's running for governor of Indiana,” Ben says, looking at her with all the pride in the world. He smiles. “Just makes sense.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to Megman & Zi - you beautiful beta fish.


End file.
